Page:On papal conclaves (IA a549801700cartuoft).djvu/31

 those who represented the ecclesiastical party combined to proclaim Alexander with a clear majority, the leader of the Emperor's partisans, Cardinal Octavius, pulled away the purple as the new Pope was about to be robed, and had it flung over his own shoulders. The Conclave broke up amidst wild tumult. Cardinal Octavius, borne in procession to the Lateran by his friends, was there installed Pope, while the rightful one, on delivery from imprisonment by Odo Frangipani, fled away from Rome, and got himself hastily consecrated in the parish church of Ninfa, that wonderful forsaken town which stands still in the Pontine Marshes, though without one soul to dwell in it any longer, wildly overgrown with the rank vegetation of those luxuriant but pestilential regions, and mirroring in the transparent waters of a hushed mere its church towers and frowning dwelling-houses and crenellated walls-the silent ghost in stone of the baronial life of the middle ages. It is but natural that a Pope who suffered so much from the persistent opposition of successive pretenders, backing their claims with an embarrassing show of canonical election, should have been deeply impressed